On a regular basis, large service-oriented enterprises typically need to identify employees having particular skills in order to staff immediate projects, as well as to identify overall skill sets (e.g., workforce capacity and skills gaps) for long-range planning purposes. To facilitate this, such companies often have a database that keeps track of the skills inventory of their employees. However, the population and maintenance of such a database usually are quite difficult.
Such conventional systems often require the workers to register their skills into such a database and to keep their information current within the database. However, such a process tends to be extremely time-consuming, particularly when the number of skills being tracked is large and when the naming conventions are highly structured, which often is desirable to facilitate subsequent searches. Moreover, even if an attempt is made at initial registration, employees often neglect to update their records on a regular basis, partly because it is difficult to enumerate all one's skills with respect to a large database of potentially relevant skills in a controlled naming scheme.